


draconian measures are the only way from here

by pvwork



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Ableist Language, Extremis, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Mild Gore, Power Imbalance, Questionable Consent, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 05:36:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvwork/pseuds/pvwork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aldrich Killian is a part-time dragon, connoisseur of pain, and will famously misquote your dad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	draconian measures are the only way from here

Aldrich decides on dragon tattoos. 

They say that the wavering forms are flattering on any body type, and he figures with a body like his that a bit of flattery couldn’t hurt. 

He sits down and he’s only a tiny bit grateful the tattoo artist doesn’t say a word, is coolly professional and doesn’t try to make small talk about anything. Somehow, conversation always leads to what happened to him and he doesn’t really have a good explanation. Life happens. When Aldrich was in the lobby of the tattoo parlour, there were glances, mostly questioning but some were concerned as if he as a victim of something other than his own ego. 

Harsh fluorescent light glint off the row of metal studs following the arch of the artist’s left eyebrow. 

“Did those hurt?” Aldrich asks. 

The pain of a thousand buzzing needles piercing his skin is making him loose-lipped. 

“Just a pinch,” She says. 

“Yeah. That’s what I’m feeling.” Aldrich says through gritted teeth and the woman, her name tag says Audrey, just grunts indifferently and wipes away at some excess ink. 

“You’ll have to come back next week to fill those in,” Audrey says.

Aldrich nods and walks out, pushing the doors of the parlor open with his free hand and only wincing a little. He’s used to physical pain, his legs, his back, his whole being are just one huge ache. What’s a little more to add the already overflowing pot of anguish? Who knows, maybe the new addition might just sweeten it a little. 

When he gets home, he stands in front of the small, dirty mirror hanging over his bathroom sink shirtless and tries to imagine what his tattoos will look like when they are finished. 

Will they make him look stronger? Will he finally embody the ambitious spirit, the powerful leader he feels like--if only given the opportunity--he could become? 

He stands in front of the mirror and watches two dragons paused in the moment just before a battle. When he looks away, they will begin to fight, raking their taloned claws against each other’s hide, and letting loose fiery flames from between their gaping maws. One represents the doubters, the ones who have stood before him and told him his dream would amount to nothing. Like his father. The other dragon he sees as himself, taking a stand (oh the irony, so rich) against those who would oppose his final goal.

*

He meets Maya on the first day of the new millenium. 

She called him in the afternoon and they meet at a little restaurant she picked the morning of. 

It was quaint. He ordered spaghetti. She wore huge sunglasses that hid half her face and sipped on half a glass of wine, claiming her stomach couldn’t handle much else after last night. 

“I want something from you. You run a think tank, right? Right. Advanced Idea Mechanics. Well, I have something I want to propose,” Maya said between sips of beer. 

Aldrich set down his silverware, wiped his mouth, and placed both hands flat on the table as he listened with rapt attention when Maya began to explain what her latest research had resulted in. 

“I--Wow. That’s,” Aldrich said. “That’s really something.” 

“I know. After I make some modifications because of a new...a discovery, I discovered this morning, it will be even better.” 

Aldrich nodded, “I’ll be your first guinea pig.” 

“I’m sure you’ll be the very best.”

Maya had a nice smile then, sincere and very kind. She thought she was doing him a favor, and in essence she was, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that he was getting the better end of the deal. She was just a scientist, while he was much, much more than just a guinea pig. 

*

He gets the tattoos done before the first injection. 

Phase 1 sounded like a doozy, looked like a doozy, and Maya was fretting away in her laboratory surrounded by plants and twenty other team members equally frazzled by the prospect of experimenting on a live human subject with just a prototype. 

Maya had said, “There are some glitches still in the system.”

That was fine by him. It didn’t really matter what kind of obstacles he met, because this battle was going to be the big one, this one was going to count, and for once, Aldrich would rise to the occasion. He felt it in his bones. He would rise and conquer. 

“Back so soon,” Audrey says. 

Aldrich sits down and smiles wide. He pushes his hair out of his face and sits as straight as he can in the chair as Audrey begins to fill in the lines of ink she drew into his skin just last week. 

“Glutton for punishment,” Aldrich says through gritted teeth, “that’s me.” 

There are sharp claws digging into the impossibly warped angles of his collarbones, and long, swishing tails caressing the curve of his non-existent biceps. He tries to raise his arms in some semblance of a power pose when he gets home this after the latest session, but nearly falls when he lets go his cane and doesn’t quite successfully lean against the counter in time. 

He picks up his phone and dials the numbers he has had memorized since the first day of the year 2000.

“How soon will it be ready?” Aldrich says. 

“Next Wednesday at the earliest.” 

“It’s a date. Don’t forget to bring the wine,” Aldrich snaps.

He sits on his bed in his small apartment glaring at the A.I.M. t-shirt hanging on the back of his desk chair. When he sleeps that night, he dreams feverishly of the day he can extend his legs fully and stand with his shoulders thrown back without pain. 

*

He has felt all kinds of pain before. He might even call himself a connoisseur at this point. 

Tumbling like the wash cycle all up in his head: you’re not my son. The image of his father’s back, clad in sturdy red and blue flannel heading out into the beautiful Minnesota-blue sky to plow the fields with strong shoulders and legs was just a slip and slide sideways away. 

Sitting alone in the library, hiding behind different shelves each day to escape the bullies that made fun of his glasses, his limp, the way he talked. 

Waiting in line at one of so many, many offices, and standing for hours and hours and then having to explain, coherently while half delirious with exhaustion, just what A.I.M. was, what he hoped to accomplish with A.I.M. and being turned down again and again and again. 

Seeing pity in every gaze, watching apathy and inaction from behind his coke-bottle glasses as people pushed and shoved him and then felt bad for him while refusing to reach out hands to steady him. Don’t want to touch that. Contagious. 

Feeling Extremis burn through his veins, change his very being, make him into some kind of creature beyond comprehension, it wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t something bigger than his comprehension either. 

He screams and strains against his constraints. He howls at the moon and snarls at the scientists that are monitoring every one of his vital signs and then some as each hour passes. Burns spread across his back as his very skin bubbles from heat formed within, and his bones readjust themselves, rebuild themselves to be stronger than ever. Some time into Hour 11 his kneecap pops and he nearly destroys the machine monitoring the administration of Phase 1 into his IV drip with the force of his fist connecting to the experimental table he is strapped down on. 

Honestly, Aldrich has never felt better.

*

Sleeping with her was a mistake. But she was close by and they were drunk. 

They were celebrating the New Year. Unironically they popped champagne bottles, and proceeded to welcome 2006 with enthusiasm and good cheer. This year, this was the year they started bringing fresh meat, new members of humanities newest order. 

It’s been a long journey. 

They huddle together in a corner of a hotel room, sitting on the lush carpet and waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square on television. 

“You’re so h-hot,” Maya hiccups. Her hands are very cold, pressing into his neck as if to check for a pulse. Light, white curtains flutter in the breeze coming in from their open window. Transparent moth wings attracted to the light of their success. The fourteenth floor hardly seems that far up anymore now that Aldrich has, for all intents and purposes, become a dragon. He’s not cold at all.

“Thanks. I don’t think you’re so bad yourself. You’re very,” Aldrich tries to say, but instead of finishing his gesture his hand just sort of lamely falls to the curve of her hip like a dead fish. 

He’s consumed at least five times the amount of whatever spirit she’s been imbibing for the past four hours leading up to the New Year, and he is starting to feel it. He’s getting buzzed and he laughs out loud, cutting off his own sentence.

It’s not actually that funny. He’s not actually that drunk. But he feels like in this moment, he might as well be damn amused. In any another world, in any other year, Maya never would have tried to put the moves on him. But it is 2006. They have reached a milestone and he is a strong, capable red-blooded American who has needs, and while she is not of the same breed (her blood is not as red as his) she obviously feels the same because she is unbuttoning his shirt clumsily, pressing the heel of her hand against the zipper of his dress pants when she finishes her business with his shirt and coat. 

“Shut up,” She says, like she has any control of the situation. 

Her hair falls across her shoulders very softly, the careful coils they were trapped in earlier in the evening unraveling in the same sloppy ways the straps of her dress slide down her arms. She looks very real, almost too real in the half light of the fallen lamp hidden by a couch, nose a little red and eyes dewy and big as they regard him as solemnly as they can.

Aldrich leans in close and breaths her in.

*

Eric Savin is the first of his new family. 

“Can you regulate? Do you dare?” 

And Eric screams his answer, his vocal chords raw and angry and burned but his answer is still a solid, unyielding yes. 

A former member of the U.S. Navy, deployed, abandoned twice over, and then left to rot in a ditch where Aldrich had the fortune to find him, Eric is the first of select group that agreed to be trial members of Extremis’ second incarnation. 

It was a lovely spring morning in 2006 when he was strapped to a table and began Phase 1. Maya’s team was bigger now, the room they were in had noise canceling insulation and panels installed, and even more instruments to collect data with. But most importantly, they had Aldrich, who was conscious and there to goad their newest recruit. 

“‘If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen’, my father used to say. He was a wise man. Can you take the heat, Savin?”

And the raw anger that explodes from him, the veins of creeping magma and burning flesh searing cracks into Savin’s human demeanor was enough to convince Aldrich that this was going to be his man. It was like the world was being handed over on a silver platter: Maya, Extremis, and Savin. The creator, the fountain of youth, and a right hand man to run the world with. 

The ones that follow Eric are just as reliable, just as dedicated to the cause. The ones that can’t regulate are obviously sent forth to perform deeds worthy of their status, but the ones that stay, that become family, they are the ones that Aldrich is most fond of. 

A brood of dragons, a hatch-set with different skills with fire, different ambitions, but their shared goal keeps them united. Aldrich is the only one who can breathe fire, burn the brightest, but that doesn’t make him any less proud of the accomplishments the others have made, the strides in precision shooting and temperature range they have accomplished are all vital pieces of data for Maya. Aldrich has never felt closer to being a proud father.

*

Just around Thanksgiving, Aldrich has the great joy of placing another plate at his table. Savin stands in the kitchen, holding his hands over a small turkey, roasting it to golden brown perfection. 

“Isn’t this nice? Just us and the kids,” Aldrich says to Maya, who is squirming in her seat, uncomfortable in the unusually high temperatures of the room. 

“Great,” Maya says, “to be here celebrating this holiday without my family.” 

“I thought we were you’re family now.” 

“I’ve celebrated too many holidays with you already.” 

Aldrich smiles, baring his teeth and showing Maya that he is unamused. She looks away, choosing not to engage in the glaring contest Aldrich knows he will win, and he smirks as he watches her take a sullen sip of fine wine. He can’t have her going home and blabbering to her family about her new research. She’s such a talkative drunk. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, his father never said. 

Instead, he will wine and dine in his line of sight. She really is drinking some fine wine though, Petrus Pomerol 1998 if he’s not mistaken.

“Eric, would you mind bringing the gravy over to the table when you’re done?” Adrich asks, “Don’t want to make this dinner any less than stellar tonight.”

*

He has always liked Pepper Potts. 

Striding in through the doors of Stark Industries, Aldrich feels unimpressed by the decor, the security, the people manning the desks he passes on the way to the conference room where he is scheduled to meet one very important CEO. 

It might have something to do with the fact that this whole building and every single working stiff housed within was a product of the blood, sweat, and tears of a Stark, people of a bloodline that was obviously not as impressive as the one Aldrich had created for himself. 

Pepper is just as, if not more, brilliant than he remembers. Her initial surprise upon seeing him delights Aldrich. He’s become someone who dresses to impress, and he’s glad that Pepper now sees him in a new light, but he’s even more pleased that the same smile she used to offer him every afternoon when he tried to ask her out for coffee was just as cool, professional, and pretty as he remembered. 

She turns him down as gracefully as she ever did, and it hardly makes his blood boil. He’s just happy to see her in her element one last time. 

He walks out and calls up Maya, tells her of the newest details they will have to incorporate into their plan as Eric drives him to the nearest airport. 

There are just so many things to do. So many things to say. So many ways that he has been working on to destroy Tony Stark (crush his fragile human skull under his Ferragamos, burn all his little suits into nothing but a puddle with his bare hands, fold his spine into some delicate origami creature, destroy him with the utter conviction of one who had been so horribly, horribly wronged).

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this mid-summer after watching Iron Man 3 (finally!), and this backstory that doesn't make sense is the product.


End file.
